Category Archives: Second Amendment

In August 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) announced multiple sizable whistleblower awards totaling approximately $16.1 million to 14 individuals. The awards ranged from $150,000 to $3.5 million. These recent awards continue a pattern by the SEC in late 2020 and 2021 of high dollar awards, some of which have topped $50 million.

The SEC whistleblower program began after Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) in 2010. Dodd-Frank authorizes the SEC to pay individuals that provide information leading to enforcement actions where over $1 million in sanctions is collected between 10% to 30% of the total award. According to the SEC, it has awarded approximately $959 million to 203 individuals since 2012.

Also of note in August, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler issued a statement regarding two September 2020 amendments to the SECs whistleblower program rules that resulted in industry concerns that the amendments would discourage whistleblowers from coming forward. Specifically, one of the amendments could preclude a whistleblower award if another whistleblower program might apply. The second amendment may lower the amount of an award. In response, the Chairman announced that he has directed his staff to consider revisions to the amendments in order to address the perceived disincentives to potential whistleblowers.

Given the SECs continued use and publicity of its whistleblower program to incentivize individuals to come forward and identify potential violations, it is important for companies to create a culture of compliance that prevents violations before they occur.

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SEC Announces More Than $16 Million In Whistleblower Awards In August 2021 - JD Supra

(The Center Square) Over 600new lawswent into effect Wednesday in Texas.

The laws were passed both the House and Senate during the 87th Legislative Session and were signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott. The new laws exclude several bills that went into effect immediately earlier in the year.

The new laws include several conservative priorities, including the Heartbeat Bill, Texas becoming a Second Amendment sanctuary state, legalizing constitutional carry, ensuring that police departments remain funded, prohibiting public homeless encampments, and providing funding for homeschooling and school choice options, among others.

"The 87th Legislative Session was a monumental success, and many of the laws going into effect today will ensure a safer, freer, healthier, and more prosperous Texas," Abbott said. His two priority legislative items, election reform and bail reform, failed to pass during the regular session and the first special session. They both passed during the second special legislative session.

Laws related to law enforcement include ensuring that cities and municipalities cannot defund their police departments, and enhancing criminal penalties for some offenses.

After the Austin City Council voted to defund its police department and crime increased, the legislature passed House Bill 1900, whichpenalizes cities that defund their police departments. Cities with populations over 250,000 that seek to defund their police departments will have their property tax revenue frozen, according to the new law.

The bill also allows the state to withhold sales taxes collected by a defunding city and give it to the Texas Department of Public Safety to pay for the cost of state resources used to protect residents of a defunded municipality.

For counties with a population of more than 1 million, another new law, Senate Bill 23, requires voter approval to reduce law enforcement budgets. If voter approval is not received, but the county still defunds police, the county's property tax revenue will be frozen by the state.

Two notable new laws are SB 576, whichmakes human smuggling a felony in the state of Texas, and SB 768, whichenhances criminal penalties for manufacturing and distributing fentanyl in Texas.

Laws increasing criminal penalties include HB 9, which enhances the criminal penalty to a state jail felony offense for anyone who knowingly blocks an emergency vehicle or obstructs access to a hospital or health care facility, and HB 2366, whichenhances criminal penalties for the use of laser pointers and creates an offense for the use of fireworks to harm or obstruct the police.

Laws aiding law enforcement include HB 103, which created an Active Shooter Alert System in Texas, and HB 3712, whichprovides increased training and transparency during the hiring process for peace officers.

Laws furthering gun rights include HB 2622, whichmakes Texas a Second Amendment sanctuary state and protects Texans from new federal gun control regulations, and HB 1927, which allows law-abiding Texans to legally carry a handgun without a license.

Other notable new laws include creating civil liability protections for farmers and ranchers (HB 365), allowing homeschooled students to participate inUniversity Interscholastic League activities (HB 547), reducing regulatory burdens for learning pods, and outlawing abortion outright in the state of Texas if or when Roe v. Wade is overturned (HB 1280).

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Over 600 new laws on the books in Texas - The Center Square

[1.] I think the civil liability scheme imposed by Texas's SB 8 is likely unconstitutional: It's inconsistent with the abortion rights recognized in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and the "undue burden" defense in the statute is likely too narrow to save it. Moreover, I think such state "private attorney general" laws that basically allow any person to sue over alleged illegal conduct are unfair to defendants. Indeed, Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, joined by Justice O'Connor, in Nike, Inc. v. Kasky (2003)a case involving a similar speech-based "private attorney general" lawsuit over supposed false advertisingstrikes me as quite plausible, and applicable here:

The delegation of state authority to private individuals authorizes a purely ideological plaintiff, convinced that his opponent is not telling the truth, to bring into the courtroom the kind of political battle better waged in other forums. Where that political battle is hard fought, such plaintiffs potentially constitute a large and hostile crowd freely able to bring prosecutions designed to vindicate their beliefs, and to do so unencumbered by the legal and practical checks that tend to keep the energies of public enforcement agencies focused upon more purely economic harm.

That threat means a commercial speaker must take particular careconsiderably more care than the speaker's noncommercial opponentswhen speaking on public matters. A large organization's unqualified claim about the adequacy of working conditions, for example, could lead to liability, should a court conclude after hearing the evidence that enough exceptions exist to warrant qualificationeven if those exceptions were unknown (but perhaps should have been known) to the speaker. Uncertainty about how a court will view these, or other, statements, can easily chill a speaker's efforts to engage in public debateparticularly where a "false advertising" law, like California's law, imposes liability based upon negligence or without fault. At the least, they create concern that the commercial speaker engaging in public debate suffers a handicap that noncommercial opponents do not.

At the same time, it is difficult to see why California needs to permit such actions by private attorneys generalat least with respect to speech that is not "core" commercial speech but is entwined with, and directed toward, a more general public debate.

One can raise the same objection to using the "private attorney general" in the context of abortion; this would be a substantive reason why SB 8 is unconstitutionally overbroad (though note that Justice Breyer's opinion was just a dissent, from the Court's decision not to hear the case for procedural reasons).

[2.] But when it comes to the procedure for challenging state civil liability schemes (focusing here on schemes where lawsuits are brought by nongovernmental plaintiffs), the legal rule seems to me to be quite well-settled. If you think that some civil liability rule is unconstitutional, you can challenge itbut only as a defense when you're sued, not through a preenforcement challenge.

We see this routinely, for instance, in First Amendment civil liability cases. In New York Times v. Sullivan, the New York Times successfully challenged Alabama libel law rules, on the grounds that they allowed public officials to sue based on honest mistakes of fact (and not just knowing or reckless falsehoods)but only as a defense to a libel lawsuit, after the suit was filed. In Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps, the Philadelphia Enquirer successfully challenged a Pennsylvania statute that require libel defendants to bear the burden of proving their statements were true, but again only as a defense to a libel lawsuit. In Snyder v. Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church people successfully argued that the Maryland "intentional infliction of emotional distress" tort unconstitutionally restricted speech on matters of private concern, but again only as a defense to a libel lawsuit. None of them could have filed a lawsuit up front in federal court seeking to declare the relevant tort law rules unconstitutional (whether on their face or as applied).

The same goes on today. A few months ago, I argued in the Oregon Supreme Court (on behalf of various academics, bloggers, and advocacy groups, as friends of the court) that the Oregon legal rule that denied certain First Amendment libel protection to "nonmedia" speakers was unconstitutional. But the defendant could raise that objection only as a defense to a libel lawsuit. A speaker in Oregon, or the two other states that follow this rule (Virginia and Wisconsin), can't launch a preenforcement challenge to the legal rule in federal court, at least until a particular plaintiff files a lawsuit or at least concretely threatens such a lawsuit.

Likewise, I have argued that, for instance, hostile environment harassment law sometimes violates the First Amendment. Some courts have agreed in some situations. But any such objections generally have to be litigated as defenses in employment law cases, not through a preenforcement challenge. To offer an oversimplified example (but one based on real life), imagine that a legislature passed a law saying, "Any employee who is offended by the display of a Confederate flag by any coworker may sue the employer for damages, and will prevail if a jury agrees that the display of the flag was severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile environment." That would be unconstitutional, I think; but I don't think an employer could challenge the law before it's enforced.

The same would be true as to lawsuits against gun manufacturers or gun stores over criminals' misuse of guns. A federal law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, preempts most such lawsuits, at least so long as the guns were sold consistently with federal and state statutes. But if a gun manufacturer or gun store thinks that some state law civil cause of action (for negligence, nuisance, and the like) is preempted by the PLCAA, or for that matter by the Second Amendment, it generally can't go into federal court to get that cause of action struck down on those grounds. It would need to wait until it's sued, and raise the federal right as a defense (often in state court).

The conceptual legal point here is that, if I want to block the enforcement of some legal rule, I have to sue the enforcer. For criminal laws, that often means I can sue prosecutors for an injunction against their enforcing it.

But for civil liability, the plaintiff could be anyone. Until a particular plaintiff comes forward to sue, or at least to specifically threaten a lawsuit, there is no-one to sue. The eventual plaintiff is entitled to an opportunity to argue that the legal claim he is bringing is sound, but that eventual plaintiff is unknown. And one generally can't sue the judge who would eventually enforce the law, because our adversarial system of justice doesn't generally view the judge or the court as the adversary whom you can sue (at least until the judge has issued a specific decision that you are challenging, for instance through a mandamus action).

Now of course there are real costs to this approach to asserting federal constitutional and statutory rights: The threat of legal liability can create a powerful "chilling effect" on people's behavior, even before a lawsuit is filed. "[T]he value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangsnot that it drops." Moreover, this system makes it possible for the government to do what Texas did, and what other states have done in other contexts through "private attorney general" schemes: Shift enforcement of laws to private plaintiffs, and thus foreclose preenforcement challenges.

At the same time, for all its costs, our legal system has generally found the chilling effect of such civil liability to be bearable, given the opportunity (however imperfect it might be) to object to such liability once one is sued. Rightly or wrongly, this unavailability of preenforcement challenges to civil liability does appear to be the standard legal rule in our system. And while I do think that the private attorney general schemes, in which the plaintiff doesn't have to show any personal injury, are especially likely to be chilling, to my knowledge they can't be challenged through preenforcement challenges, either.

I may be mistaken; though I know a decent amount about such procedural rules (which are generally referred to under the rubric of "federal courts" rules, or just "Fed Courts," the common label for the class in which they are taught), this isn't my core area of expertise. If you can come up with precedents that would allow preenforcement challenges to such civil liability (again, civil liability in cases brought by nongovernmental actors), I would love to hear about it and perhaps use it. But that's my general sense of the matter.

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Challenging Unconstitutional Civil Liability Schemes, as to Abortion, Speech, Guns, Etc. - Reason

A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, by Geo Maher Verso hide caption

A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, by Geo Maher

For many, the story of Kyle Rittenhouse seemed like an exceptionally sordid and violent tale in the racial conflict of 2020.

Rittenhouse stands charged with the murders of two protesters and the attempted murder of another who was severely wounded in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at a protest two days after Jacob Blake, who was Black, was shot seven times from behind by a police officer. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time.

When protests erupted in Kenosha, a former city alderman started a militia called the Kenosha Guard, and posted a call on Facebook for "Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property." According to widespread reporting, Rittenhouse drove from Illinois to a car dealership where he met with some police officers affiliated with the Kenosha Guard. After he shot demonstrators trying to apprehend him, he allegedly approached a police officer, who told him to leave the scene. That evening, clips of Rittenhouse shooting the demonstrators and being tossed water from police officers, went viral. Ever since, his case has become a cause clbre for conservatives and supporters of vigilante action against "antifa." Rittenhouse's trial this November stands to be a high-profile affair he is expected to say the shootings were in self-defense one that Paige Williams at The New Yorker argues "has been framed as the broadest possible interpretation of the Second Amendment."

But for Geo Maher, an abolitionist activist, historian and author of the new book, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, nothing about Rittenhouse's case is exceptional. In the very first chapter of the book, Maher establishes the police as a fundamentally rotten institution that is rarely distinguishable from the white mob or vigilante killers; instead, he writes, "self-deputized defenders of property and whiteness have almost always served as a brutal adjunct to the police." The line between them is almost nonexistent throughout American history, Maher contends. The police, as with the Rittenhouse case, have always been complicit, Maher argues; from vigilantism on the southern border, to lynch mobs, and modern militias.

Details that have come into focus after the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6 have made clear, Maher writes, just how the police and the violent far-right of this country blur together. Neither Ahmaud Arbery nor Trayvon Martin, among countless others, were killed by active police officers, but they were nonetheless killed by what Maher calls the "pig majority" which includes not just police but their "volunteer deputies...the judges, the courts, the juries, and the grand juries... the mayors and the district attorneys who demand 'law and order'... the racist media apparatus that bends over backwards to turn victims into aggressors." As Tupac Shakur famously put it, the police is "the biggest gang in America," Maher contends.

This all may seem ripped from an overly broad, unrigorous, and dogmatic polemic, but Maher's book is nothing if not exhaustive. From transit police to the police unions under the Fraternal Order of the Police to a complicit Black elite, Maher implicates the police and its allies in the history of American violence writ large. "Police embodied the division of the poor," he writes about the days of slave patrols, "and in their practical function they uphold that division every day, patrolling the boundaries of property and that most peculiar form of property that is whiteness." In that context, Kyle Rittenhouse's story is not surprising, because his victims were people the police institution was never meant to serve or protect.

This may be more visibly obvious today but that's because of how grand the police as an institution has become in terms of sheer scale and power in past decades. There are many times more police officers on streets today as compared to decades ago and state and local spending on police has increased as well, as Maher details. This despite the fact that, as political scientist David Bayley puts it in the book: "one of the best kept secrets of modern life" is that "police do not prevent crime." Maher uses data do support this claim. Meanwhile, there is scant evidence that "police reform," the usual answer to problems with policing, has actually made anything safer: If anything, from bodycams to chokeholds to more diverse police departments, the evidence impressively detailed by Maher suggests that each has actually exacerbated the problems it was meant to fix; while making perpetration of crime by police more likely.

Gallingly, according to several federal court rulings, police often are not legally required to serve and protect communities. One particularly shocking case that Maher points to is the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, during which the armed sheriff's deputy hid in the school. A federal court ruled that the sheriff's office had no duty to protect the students. This joined a spate of federal and SCOTUS rulings, detailed by Maher, that concluded, in cases from child abuse to domestic violence, the police have no legal duty to protect the public from private, third-party actors.

Maher joins contemporary scholars and organizers including Beth Richie, Michelle Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore who have made sense of the American carceral state through a variety of terms Prison Nation, The New Jim Crow, organized abandonment. They conjoin with a tradition of Black Marxist scholars like W.E.B DuBois, Angela Davis, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Robin D. G. Kelley in the broad indictment of capitalism and colonialism as active producers of "modern" policing. A recent turn in popular discourse also seemingly breaks from the Marxist tradition in seeing through the lens of both race and class neither subservient to the other as the forces that stratify American society. It should not be surprising then that abolitionism of the carceral state writ large, not merely of police as the demand to defund the police might suggest is ambitious. As the organizer Mariame Kaba has noted, "We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don't want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete."

A World Without Police is of a piece with the current vein of abolitionism espoused by Kaba, Yamahtta-Taylor and others. Indeed, published the same year as Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us, Maher's book, occasionally redundant but mostly complementary, is an indicator of the growing popularity of the radical abolitionist framework. But the title of Maher's book suggests that it serves to answer the "what now?" question that is often asked by critics who find abolitionism to be a grandiloquent suggestion of utopianism, with reform its "pragmatic" counterpart. While the question clearly provides no response to Maher's hefty critique, the title A World Without Police is still a bit of an albatross.

What does Maher think the world without police looks like? It's unclear but not from lack of trying on his part. After all, nobody ever argued that remaking society was supposed to be easy. Maher details the lessons from both failed and tentatively successful grassroots efforts across the country, experiments in restorative justice within city and neighborhood campaigns to "free not only from the police but also from all forms of intra-community violence." He gives the demand to abolish ICE impressive space, connecting immigration and American complicity in the state of Central and Latin American societies with the goal for the global abolition of police. The insistence on "breathing room for over-policed communities to regenerate a lost social fabric and to build real alternatives" and global solidarity is predictable but it tapers off into a haze hard that's to fault Maher for. Abolitionism requires not just the end of the police and prisons but global capitalism: Seeing the world beyond that is famously hard.

"Deep down, we all know what a world without police looks like," Maher claims. A community, maybe. But the world? not so much. Perhaps this is because of a problem with Maher's "global" argument. Under the shadow of empire, including American military interventionism in the present, "the policing of imperial power has developed in conjunction with the domestic policing of colonized and formerly enslaved populations." Global policing binds the specific history of the U.S. to the world writ large, because empire truly was and is global. But a crucial piece of the puzzle seems to be missing. Is the legacy of Western empire sufficient to explain the ubiquity of police in societies across the world?

How did the police even originate? Mileage varies. Maher, like many, argues that the police are an invention meant to protect racial capitalism, and subjugate the working class. The historian Jill Lepore, more reformist than radical thinker, ascribes its origins to slavery. Both seem to be explaining the uniquely powerful iteration of modern police, but militias, torture, vigilantism, and mechanisms of controlling society are all mythological. Every major religion and ancient civilization has its version of a policed society. Is policing as a mechanism of power a feature of human history?

The world beyond police is hard to imagine. But making it easy to want is enough of a feat. Geo Maher's vision may not get readers to see past the horizon into a world without police but it is as convincing as any book can be that we must at least try.

Kamil Ahsan is a biologist, historian and writer based in New Haven. He is an editor at Barrelhouse and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Prospect, Salon and Chicago Review.

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Book Review: Geo Maher's 'A World Without Police' On Abolishing The Police - NPR

Texans can now openly carry a handgun in public without a permit or firearms training. The permitless carry law, along with a slew of other new firearms legislation, went into effect this week as the Lone Star State joined around 20 other states as a Second Amendment sanctuary, Houston Public Media reported.

Politicians from the federal level to the local level have threatened to take guns from law-abiding citizens but we will not let that happen in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott alleged this summer after signing several of the new gun laws. Texas will always be the leader in defending the Second Amendment, which is why we built a barrier around gun rights this session.

The Texas legislature passed 666 bills which went into effect on Sept. 1, according to The Texas Tribune. This session, lawmakers passed more than 20 new laws related to firearms, with most loosening or limiting restriction on guns, reported Houston Public Media.

On the heels of a pair of mass shootings, some Texas lawmakers expected the legislative body to pass more restrictive gun laws in 2021, The Texas Tribune reported, but the opposite happened.

Earlier this year, Texas police officials including Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia encouraged lawmakers to forgo relaxing the states firearms laws, but ultimately it didnt matter, Dallas-Fort Worths NBC 5 reported.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler trolled Gov. Abbott on Twitter Wednesday when the new gun laws and Texas new abortion ban went into effect at the same time. The mayor retweeted a post from Abbott about the abortion ban, implying the governor was being disingenuous in his concern for Texans lives.

Originally posted here:
What is the new Texas gun law? What are the rules? - Deseret News

September 1, 2021 | Austin, Texas | Press Release

Over 600 new laws signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott go into effect today in the state of Texas. These new laws, including the Heartbeat Bill, constitutional carry legislation, and laws that protect law enforcement, were passed during the 87th Legislative Session.

"The 87th Legislative Session was a monumental success, and many of the laws going into effect today will ensure a safer, freer, healthier, and more prosperous Texas," said Governor Abbott. "I look forward to my continued work with the legislature to build upon these successes and create an even brighter future for the Lone Star State."

A full list of new laws can be found here.

Included in the new laws are:

House Bill 9 enhances the criminal penalty to a state jail felony offense for anyone who knowingly blocks an emergency vehicle or obstructs access to a hospital or health care facility.

House Bill 103 creates an Active Shooter Alert System in Texas.

House Bill 365 creates civil liability protections for farmers and ranchers.

House Bill 547 allows home-schooled students to participate in UIL activities.

House Bill 957 repeals the criminal offense of possessing, manufacturing, transporting, or repairing a firearm silencer. It also ensures that any firearm suppressor manufactured in Texas, and that remains in Texas, will not be subject to federal law or federal regulation.

House Bill 1280 will outlaw abortion in Texas after Roe v. Wade is overturned.

House Bill 1500 prevents any government entity from prohibiting the sale or transportation of firearms or ammunition during a declared disaster or emergency.

House Bill 1900 penalizes cities that defund their police departments. The law freezes property tax revenues for cities with a population over 250,000 that defund the police. Under this law, cities that defund the police will lose their annexation powers for 10 years and any area annexed by a defunding city in the past 30 years can vote to dis-annex from the city. It also allows the State of Texas to withhold sales taxes collected by a defunding city and give it to the Texas Department of Public Safety to pay for the cost of state resources used to protect residents of a defunded municipality.

House Bill 1925 prohibits camping in public spaces.

House Bill 1927 authorizes Constitutional Carry in Texas, meaning law-abiding Texans can legally carry a handgun without a license to carry.

House Bill 2366 enhances criminal penalties for the use of laser pointers and creates an offense for the use of fireworks to harm or obstruct the police.

House Bill 2622 makes Texas a Second Amendment Sanctuary State by protecting Texans from new federal gun control regulations.

House Bill 3257 creates the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission.

House Bill 3712 provides increased training and transparency during the hiring process for peace officers.

Senate Bill 8 ("The Heartbeat Bill") bans abortion the moment a baby's heartbeat is detected in the womb.

Senate Bill 13 prohibits state contracts and investments with companies that boycott energy companies.

Senate Bill 19 prohibits any governmental entity from contracting with any business that discriminates against firearm and ammunition businesses or organizations.

Senate Bill 20 allows guests to store firearms in their hotel rooms.

Senate Bill 23 requires voter approval to reduce law enforcement budgets in counties with a population of more than one million. If voter approval is not received, but the county still defunds the police, the county's property tax revenue will be frozen.

Senate Bill 24 requires police departments to review files of applicants before they are hired to ensure officers with a negative history aren't passed between departments.

Senate Bill 550 removes the shoulder or belt holster requirements, allowing Texans to carry firearms in whatever kind of holster they choose.

Senate Bill 576 creates a felony offense for the smuggling of persons into Texas.

Senate Bill 768 enhances criminal penalties for manufacturing and distributing fentanyl in Texas.

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Over 600 New Laws Go Into Effect Today In State of Texas - Office of the Texas Governor

Employee Curt Hubbard unloads a shipment of ammunition at Full Armor Firearms in Houston in June. Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Employee Curt Hubbard unloads a shipment of ammunition at Full Armor Firearms in Houston in June.

Texans can now carry a handgun in public without a permit or the background check and training the state previously required.

Gun rights advocates lauded the new state law called "constitutional carry" by supporters for removing what they considered an unfair burden on gun owners.

But the law, which took effect Wednesday, has its critics. Gun safety groups oppose permitless carry. And many law enforcement officials, including Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia and Doug Griffith, the president of the Houston Police Officers' Union, have said it would make the jobs of police officers more dangerous.

Still, the state's Republican-majority legislature passed the law earlier this year, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed it over the summer.

"Politicians from the federal level to the local level have threatened to take guns from law-abiding citizens but we will not let that happen in Texas," Abbott said in a June statement when he signed the permitless carry bill and six other gun laws.

"Texas will always be the leader in defending the Second Amendment, which is why we built a barrier around gun rights this session," he added.

The legislative session was the first since several mass shootings in Texas, including one at an El Paso Walmart in which a racially motivated gunman killed 23 people.

Now, the Lone Star State joins a slew of others that have loosened or removed permitting requirements this year. Those states include Iowa, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Tennessee.

The new law allows anyone 21 years of age or older to carry a handgun, unless they have a violent conviction or are otherwise barred by law. But a background check that might flag such a disqualification is no longer necessary to carry a handgun.

Most residents were previously required to obtain a license to carry a handgun, according to The Texas Tribune. The process included fingerprinting, four to six hours of training, a written exam and a shooting proficiency test.

Texans were already allowed to carry rifles in public without a license.

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No Permit Or Training Required To Carry Handgun Under New Texas Law - NPR

Mayor Turners Statement on Texas Permitless Carry Law

September 1, 2021 -- Please attribute the followingstatement to Mayor Sylvester Turner.

"House Bill 1927 is now law in Texas, allowing anyone who legally owns a gun to carry it in public without a permit or the training previously required for a permit.

As Mayor of Houston, I am very concerned that the State of Texas loosened gun laws, especially during a time of increased gun violence. Many Texans prize their Second Amendment rights, but the Second Amendment does not provide for the right of reckless endangerment.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, handgun homicide rates increase 11% and violent crime increases 13-15% in states that weaken their permitting process. Under this bill, even a law-abiding citizen can become a danger. Someone who has literally no firearms training and has never even fired a gun could legally carry a gun. They could become a danger to themselves and others due to mishandling a deadly weapon.

Not only are underserved and poor communities disproportionately impacted by an unrelenting spate of homicides and gun crimes, but law enforcement officials are less safe.

With increasing gun crimes on the rise nationwide, adding more unregulated firearms in the population will not increase public safety. Law enforcement is clear on that.

This flawed new law will have a harmful impact inside our neighborhoods and on our streets. Unregulated guns aggravate our public safety problems.

My administration seeks to increase public safety and build trust among Houstonians. That work will continue despite the harmful effects of HB 1927.

Houstons Youth Violence Plan, spearheaded by the Houston Health Department, aims to address the root causes of violence and promote opportunities for prevention through evidence-based crime prevention solutions.

I join the many Houstonians who are not happy with the elimination of gun permitting and the associated basic firearm safety training.

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Press Releases - City of Houston

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore courtesy Flickr

As reports of COVID-19 cases increase, and various politicians demand more lockdowns and mandates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced plans to cure an epidemic of crime?

Speaking with CNN last week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said, Something has to be done about [illegal shootings]. Now is the timeits pedal to the metal time.

We havent spent the time, energy and frankly the resources to understand this problem because its been so divided, she said, as CNN pointed to biased numbers from the Gun Violence Archive.

Armed with a renewed focusand millions in federal funding to study so-called gun violencetheyre already pumping cash into what they say are violence-prevention projects.

CNN also recycled the myth that the NRA convinced Congress to cut all of the CDCs funding for gun research. In actuality, the CDC was only barred from spending money to advocate or promote gun control. (Of course, if you say you cant study criminal shootings without advocating for gun control, arent you implicitly validating gun owners concerns of an underlying political agenda?)

Im not here about gun control, Walensky said. Im here about preventing gun violence and gun death. In other words, she wants people to compromise away their right to keep and bear arms by empowering her agency to write public policy.

Premise-as-the-conclusion, agenda-driven research is often funded with the express purpose of fueling anti-Second Amendment articles from the mainstream media that they then hope will impact public opinion. In sum, its all political theatre.

Prior to recent rises in crime related to civil unrest and economic shutdowns, violent crime was basically in adecades-longdecline, as shown by the FBIsUniform Crime Reportsand the Department of JusticesCrime Victimization Survey. (The former measures formal reports, the latter surveys victims to account for incomplete records.)

The CDC was actually caught burying data on defensive gun use in the past. Also, officials, such as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, have all used this type of rhetoric to push gun control in the past.

Walensky has also faced bipartisan criticism in recent months for the CDCs lack of transparency, changing goalposts, and contradictory messaging on COVID-19 policyall of which has been used as excuses by some politicians to impact gun sales. Walensky recently said shes struggling to communicate with the public on the issue. Maybe thats why separate polls show public trust in the CDC has declined since the start of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, gun owners are particularly justified in thinking that the head of a government agency created to control and prevent disease should be focused on combatting COVID-19 during this ongoing pandemic, not looking for excuses to infringe upon a constitutional right.

Link:
Amid a Pandemic, Biden's CDC Director Goes After the Second Amendment - America's 1st Freedom

A county judge has ruled against St. Louis City and St, Louis County in their argument against the new state law known as the Second Amendment Preservation Act.

The law is to stop local law enforcement from helping federal investigators if guns are seized in an operation: St. Louis argued that this cripples any joint crime-fighting efforts- especially against violent crime. Cole County Judge Daniel Green, in a two-page ruling, said that if there is a remedy for a complaint, then he cannot block the law, that the constitutional issues raised in this matter should be litigated, by each plaintiff in each separate case.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt released the following statement following the Cole County Circuit Courts denial of Jackson County, St. Louis County, St. Louis City, and the Department of Justices request for an injunction blocking Missouris Second Amendment Preservation Act.

The ruling was an important victory for the Missouri Attorney Generals Office over the Biden Department of Justice, and for the Second Amendment rights of all Missourians, said Attorney General Schmitt. Since the Second Amendment Preservation Act was passed, I promised to fiercely defend the law and Missourians Second Amendment rights thats exactly what we did in this case and will continue to do moving forward.

The judgment from the court can be found here.

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Audio: St. Louis City and county lose in effort to block Second Amendment Preservation Act. - kttn